The Secret Power

"Ah! The old story! My dear Marchese, do not fret your intellectual perception uselessly! Think what we have in store for us!--such wonders as none have yet explored,--the mysteries of the high and the low--the light and the dark--and in those far-off spaces strewn with stars, we may even hear things that no mortal has yet heard--"

"And what is the use of it all?" he suddenly demanded.

She opened her deep blue eyes in amaze.

"The use of it?... You ask the use of it?--"

"Yes--the use of it--without love!" he answered, his voice shaken with a sudden emotion--"Madonna, forgive me!--Listen with patience for one moment!--and think of the whole world mastered and possessed--but without anyone to love in it--without anyone to love YOU! Suppose you could command the elements--suppose every force that science could bestow were yours, and yet!--no love for you--no love in yourself for anyone--what would be the use of it all? Think, Madonna!"

She raised her delicate eyebrows in a little surprise,--a faint smile was on her lips.

"Dear Marchese, I DO think! I HAVE thought!" she answered--"And I have observed! Love--such as I imagined it when I was quite a young girl--does not exist. The passion called by that name is too petty and personal for me. Men have made love to me often--not as prettily perhaps as you do!--but in America at least love means dollars! Yes, truly! Any man would love my dollars, and take me with them, just thrown in! You, perhaps--"

"I should love you if you were quite poor!" he interposed vehemently.

She laughed.

"Would you? Don't be angry if I doubt it! If I were 'quite poor' I could not have given you your big commission here--this house would not have been restored to its former beauty, and the White Eagle would be still a bird of the brain and not of the air! No, you very charming Marchese!--I should not have the same fascination for you without my dollars!--and I may tell you that the only man I ever felt disposed to like,--just a little,--is a kind of rude brute who despises my dollars and me!"

His brows knitted involuntarily.

"Then there IS some man you like?" he asked, stiffly.

"I'm not sure!" she answered, lightly--"I said I felt 'disposed' to like him! But that's only in the spirit of contradiction, because he detests ME! And it's a sort of duel between us of sheer intellectuality, because he is trying to discover--in the usual slow, laborious, calculating methods of man--the very thing I HAVE discovered! He's on the verge--But not across it!"